[X4U] Sent Mailbox empty

[Stroller]

On Nov 28, 2005, at 4:18 pm, A. Scott McCulloch wrote:
>
> Trying to help my girlfriend who's using 10.3.9 - yesterday she  
> discovered that all of the sent mail from one of her accounts was  
> gone. She restarted Mail a couple of times, and I think she got an  
> error message the first time (I wasn't there) that said something  
> about the index. She dismissed it. :(
>
> Anyway, so now I'm trying to help. I copied the whole ~/Library/Mail  
> directory to another part of her disk for safety. The Sent Mail mbox  
> was 800MB, so I know the sent mail must still have been there. I tried  
> rebuilding the mailbox in Mail, but nothing happened. So then I tried  
> restarting her iMac... now the Send Mail mbox is showing only 88KB !!  
> Help!! Oh, wait I did the backup, good. So, I go to the backup...  
> and... S*@# - it's only 88KB now too!!! Help!!!
>
> Is all that sent mail now gone? Is there some way to recover it? Any  
> ideas that might help me get out of the doghouse!!!

Blimey! At least I'm not alone.
I checked my sent items yesterday to find that everything after June  
30th 2004 was missing.

This is true for sent items in both my accounts, both of which are  
IMAP, but does not appear to affect any other mailboxes (my "read  
items"). I was blaming the problem on kMail on my Linux laptop, which  
was connected to this server yesterday for the first time in ages. Now  
I wonder if Mail.app is at fault.

The messages have been deleted from the server, as they are missing  
whether I check from Mail.app on my Powerbook, PowerMac, Thinkpad or by  
webmail. I'm really quite annoyed at myself for not having a backup,  
because I've been "meaning to get around" to automating that for a  
while now.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to help with your problem, as even missing  
the messages my Sent Items shows 1514 messages:

   $ pwd  
/Users/stroller/Library/Mail/IMAP-stroller at mail.stroller.uk.eu.org/ 
INBOX/Sent.imapmbox/CachedMessages
   $ du -sh .
   8.5M    .
   $ ls -1 | wc -l
       1515
   $

I may now try checking the cache on my laptop, but I'm frankly not  
optimistic.

Stroller.